ProteinSpill.com

enewuser, enewgroup failed during emerge world in Gentoo

I was upgrading one of my Gentoo Linux machines over the weekend and ran into this problem again. I couldn’t remember how I fixed it the first time and hours of searching Google turned up nothing useful. Apparently there are a lot of Gentoo ebuilds in Google’s index so all I was getting was source code.

It turns out that upgrading sys-apps/shadow fixes it. After you emerge that you can  resume your emerge world.

Gentoo’s Portage does a great job of resolving dependencies between packages but doesn’t always seem to do it in the best order. Either that or there are a bunch of packages out there that don’t specify all of their requirements. Hopefully this will help a few folks.

Software Upgrades

Over the weekend I finally got around to upgrading to Gallery2. It’s pretty nice and integrates with WordPress well. If you registered as a user here contact me for your own photo album.

I also did a lot of work to cut down on referer spam. Not anything you’d really see, unless you go to Site Statistics. You’ll now notice it requires a login. Spammers have found that if they visit your site with a bogus referer (the “referer” is the site you came from to find proteinspill, like google.com) then your statistics will pick it up and display a link. When the search engines come around to index your site, it boosts their PageRank. Pretty sad really. Especially when you consider that I had noindex,nofollow on that link anyway—The search engines wouldn’t even see it.

I’m blocking those spammers two different ways. 1. I’m using Deny From in the Apache vhost.conf for specific IP addresses and subnets. Unfortunately this is a pain to keep up with…spammers use many compromised computers to get this done and it’s hard to tell what legitimate traffic looks like. Plus every time you change this file you have to reload the server. 2. I found a way to use mod_rewrite in .htaccess to actually search for the known bogus referers. When it encounters one of those, I issue a 301 Redirect with their referer as the destination. Their botnets will hit their own server! hehe

Finally, since I’m learning all about mod_rewrite, I changed the way the stories are linked. Instead of ?p=168 there is a much more meaningful URL to each story. Click on a story title to see what I mean. The old links still work too, but it caused the search engines to re-index my entire site last night. Lots of traffic all of a sudden!

Mac OS X Tiger, NIS login and NFS automounter

I can’t seem to find a solution to my problem on the forums or even here at Integrating Mac OS X in an NIS network so I’m going to do a little search engine trolling here. Perhaps someone else is having a similar problem.

I have a Gentoo Linux machine running NIS and NFS. I set up the mounts.byname like it says in the referenced instructions. Everything seems to work as it should; it passes all the tests. For example:

lady:~ whimmel$ ypwhich
slappy
lady:~ whimmel$ ypmatch -k whimbot passwd
whimbot whimbot:(password):1003:100::/home/whimbot:/bin/bash

I can su to one of the imported userids just fine and it mounts my home directory across the network as expected. The shell works, the files are there with the correct permissions, etc. However, when I try to login from the OS X login box, it just shakes at me. Really annoying. I even have this set properly:

With that set, Directory Access will use the NIS domain to authenticate, right? I can verify that with lookupd in debug mode:

lady:~ whimmel$ lookupd -d
lookupd version 369.5 (root 2006.02.10 04:16:23 UTC)
Enter command name, “help”, or “quit” to exit
> userWithName: whimbot
Dictionary: “DS: user whimbot”
_lookup_agent: DSAgent
_lookup_validation: 1155043714
gid: 100
home: /home/whimbot
name: whimbot
passwd: (password)
realname:
shell: /bin/bash
uid: 1003
+ Category: user
+ Time to live: 43200
+ Age: 0 (expires in 43200 seconds)
+ Negative: No
+ Cache hits: 0
+ Retain count: 3

Even here it is using the correct stuff. What have I done wrong? I’ve been over the “Integrating…” instructions several times. Ugh. I just want a single-signon across all the machines on the network.

Sun Fire T2000 goin’ back to cali

I boxed up the T2000 and dropped it off at my convenient 24-hour Fedex Kinko’s last night. It’s a shame it had to go back just as I was getting time to play with it. Maybe I’ll test something else soon.. perhaps something more appropriate, like a x4100.

In the meantime, I’m going to try to learn more about Solaris. One of the problems I had with testing this machine properly was that my (gobs of) Linux experience really didn’t apply directly like I hoped. The last time I really played with Solaris was back in the 2.x days c.1996. Things have changed quite a bit.

In the last week I had the Sun Fire, I did get to try installing Gentoo Linux on it. OH MY. Thanks go to David S. Miller for his work on the kernel and Gustavo for the Gentoo LiveCD. I built a vanilla 2.6.17 kernel and modules in about 4 minutes. The rest of the stage 3 install went on in just a couple of hours. Most of the delay was my relatively slow 768K DSL connection, pulling down source. The T2000 with a cross-compiler would’ve made a REALLY sweet distcc host!

Pretty, but it’s whats inside that counts.

Whenever you can type “make -j17″ without distcc, it’s a beautiful thing. If I had more time with the box I would’ve done more measuring around this.

Eclipse on Mac OS X (Intel)

What a pain this was. For those of you who don’t know, Eclipse is an integrated development environment written in Java. Java is supposed to be “write once, run anywhere.” Not exactly the case here, and not clear if you try to download it for your shiny new Intel Macintosh.

I downloaded the latest stable release, 3.12 and installed it on my MacBook. When I went to run it, it throws up the splash screen and looks like it’s going to run and then a simple messagebox with a message to look in ~/Documents/workspace/.metalog/.log for details.

java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError:
/Applications/eclipse/configuration/org.eclipse.osgi/
bundles/63/1/.cp/libswt-pi-carbon-3139.jnilib:
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1586)

There’s actually a lot more to it than that, but that’s all the details I had to go on. I’m not exactly familiar with Java so I don’t know how to decipher this. I decided to try jEdit instead. Nice editor, but I’m using Eclipse at work.

I searched Google for days using keywords like “eclipse mac” or “eclipse error jini” or “eclipse error install” which didn’t turn up anything useful. It was beginning to look like I was the only one to get this error. Today I searched for “eclipse unsatisfiedlinkerror” duh! I got a link to Steph’s blog which pointed out another stupid assumption. I’m not going to take the entire blame here though—remember, Java isn’t supposed to be platform-specific.

It turns out that there is a newer (unstable?) release of Eclipse that supports the Intel Macs. I’m in the process of downloading it now.

It works!

Server Move

Have you noticed that my entries here aren’t nearly as funny as they were when I was working in Monorails?

A few days ago, my only Windows machine, squit, had a network card pop. Unfortunately my most recent Quicken data is sitting on there. Rather than buy a laptop or upgrade my Mac Mini (lady) to do the Boot Camp thing I decided to promote slappy (file server) to my desk and install vmware.

While installing vmware, I was also trying to learn how to configure porterhouse (the Sun Fire server). I set it up in what was formerly Tracie’s room because it’s so loud.

As if that wasn’t enough going on, Ryan and I were doing last minute configuration on chuck (my new-to-me Dell Poweredge 1650) and moving shank (a virtual machine that hosts proteinspill.com and several other sites) over to it. Hopefully nobody noticed the 20 minutes or so of downtime while the vm was copied over.

Yesterday I emailed Karin to ask about the possibility of going part time here at work. I’m working so much even my fun time looks a lot like work. She suggested that maybe I cut Disney.. what?! That’s my sanity break there. If I were to leave Disney completely, I’d have nothing to say to you people but stuff about traffic on I-4 and plugging computers together. Bleh

Site changes

I made some changes to the site… hopefully it won’t cause too much spam to appear. If it does, I’ll lock it down again. Basically, you won’t be required to register as a user in order to post a comment to an article. You also aren’t required to register to post in a forum.

I closed a couple of the forums which weren’t being used so far and I opened a new one. Those of you who are participating in my evaluation are encouraged to post about your experiences with the Sun Fire server there.

Sun Fire T2000 update

Good news, I was able to make a proper serial cable last night and boot the machine. It is officially named porterhouse.*

I didn’t have much time to play with it late last night but at least I got it configured to go on the network. I’m going to have to review some Solaris admin stuff so I can install software and create the necessary IP tunnels so it can be beat upon. If you have an interest in helping me evaluate porterhouse, contact me and I may give you a virtual machine.

* those of you who don’t know: I name servers for cuts of meat and computers I use at home for Animaniacs characters. Most people use planets, Disney, or greek mythological creatures. That’s boring. At work we use sea creatures: moray, marlin, etc. What’s your naming convention?

Sun Fire T2000 free trial

The machine has arrived. I can’t believe they send me a machine like this for free. It’s nuts.

Only problem with it is I can’t really test it yet. It didn’t include the serial cable necessary to do the initial configuration, so I made one. I plugged in my trusty Wyse 30 terminal and connected the machine to power. I see the ALOM starting up and it eventually arrives at the sc> prompt. I type and nothing happens. I can’t configure it!

It has a network management port but that doesn’t have an IP address assigned. DHCP is turned off by default; you enable that via the serial management port. I can boot the machine via the power button.. and it does come up, but the system console defaults to the serial management port. So again, I can’t even log in to the thing.

One thing is for sure, it’s LOUD. Testing it here in my bedroom is kinda silly but it’s the only room in the house with A/C. On Monday, I’m going to try and contact Sun to get an official cable. If that doesn’t work, then I guess I’ll have to see about swapping this box for another. I’m sure the cable problem isn’t on my end because my adapters work between PCs and my Wyse30 just fine.

Potential New Server

A week or so ago I received an email from Sun Microsystems about their new promotion for the Sun Fire T2000: A sweet “eco-friendly” webserver. 60-day free trial. Ok, I’ll bite.

I filled out the application and didn’t hear anything for a week. After a couple of emails back-and-forth it appears they are going to ship one to me. Naturally, I’m trying to find a way to pay for it so I don’t have to send it back at the end of the trial. This is where you come in:

I’m going to be redesigning my web hosting site and restructuring the pricing levels.

I’m probably going to offer (low) fee-based big email accounts here at proteinspill.com. You’ll be able to get your very own proteinspill.com address with at least half-a-gig of storage. I’ll let you use that for offline backups too.

a few other tricks up my sleeve that I’ll publish here when ready

If you currently have a website somewhere else *seriously consider* moving it to me. This is a wicked little box and you want your account on it. I promise.